From Argentina to Cambodia, Picturing the Disappeared

In this week’s issue, Francisco Goldman writes about the forced disappearance of as many as thirty thousand people by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Artists from across South America have created powerful bodies of work that reflect on these atrocities, which happened throughout the Southern Cone during this era of military dictatorship: citizens were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the thousands by their own militaries, and their families were left with no knowledge of their fates.

Gervasio Sánchez’s book “Disappeared” explores the nightmare of forced disappearance not just in South America but around the world: Cambodia and Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Spain. The countries span the globe, but “the violence, the tragedy, the pain and loss and suffering, however, are the same,” Carmen Contreras Gomez, the managing director of the Obra Social Caja Madrid, writes in the introduction. Other photographers who have worked extensively on the theme of the disappeared are Paula Luttringer, who was herself a former prisoner; Marcelo Brodsky, whose brother and many classmates were disappeared; Joao Pina, who photographed Goldman’s story for the magazine; and Giancarlo Ceraudo. Here’s a selection of these artists’ thoughts and work.

Potocari, Bosnia-Herzegovina, July, 2010. Hundreds of coffins ready for the funeral ceremony held each year on 11 July to commemorate the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the most brutal massacre in Europe since World War Two. All those remains that have been identified in the previous year are buried. In 2010, the year this photograph was taken, 775 bodies were buried.

“When I look back [on my work], I see … daughters who have lost their youth and continue searching. I see wives who have sacrificed the best years of their lives and continue hoping. I see fathers and grandfathers forced to play secondary roles out of fear of turning up themselves on the long list of disappeared if they raised their voices in complaint, and they continue crying.” —Gervasio Sánchez